(AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin)
Bluesman James "T-Model" Ford plays in the key of "When your woman's done left you." (AP Photo/Derek Anderson)
"You gotta settle down with the blues, settle down with the blues, settle down with the blues," says bluesman David "Honeyboy" Edwards. "And listen to what's going on." (AP Photo/Derek Anderson)
People still come out to a desolate Tutwiler, Miss., to place harmonicas and other mementos on the gravestone of the late bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson (II), born Aleck Miller. (AP Photo/Derek Anderson)
It's midnight at the nearly empty Walnut Street Blues Bar. A 21-year-old guy with a ponytail and an earring struggles to tune his guitar to one played by a weathered bluesman sitting across from him on the dance floor.
"Can I get your G?" he asks the 85-year-old legend known as T-Model Ford.
The old man takes a slow sip of his Jack Daniel's. He starts a song. He offers no help to the serious young aspirant from Milwaukee.
"When your woman's done left you," T-Model says. "That's what key I'm in."
Some old bluesmen like T-Model Ford have acquired a gentle disdain for a generation they see as unable to grasp their history or music. It's a growing cultural divide that could threaten the future of the blues in the Mississippi Delta, a swath of land known for its fertile soil, its harsh sharecropping history -- and its music.
T-Model, born James Lewis Carter Ford, grew up plowing behind a mule. He's had five wives. He once killed a man; he insists the other guy "cut me first." He spent two years working on a chain gang until he got a lawyer and claimed self-defense.
His speaking voice is barely audible in his old age. While he plays, his walking stick lies beside him on the floor. And here comes a dude from "Laverne and Shirley" country, trying to get into the key of all that.
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These days, blues is often thought of as an easy way to filter out young riff-raff from the surviving jukes.
"All young people want to hear is hip-hop," says Mary Shepard, the longtime owner of Club Ebony in Indianola, Miss. "If you want to get rid of them, play three or four blues songs."
Young locals are associated less with the blues music that fills the disappearing clubs and more with the crack cocaine and gang violence that are partly responsible for killing the juke joints.
It used to be that a musician could start on one end of Nelson Street in Greenville and acquire an entire band by the time he reached the other end, according to Billy Johnson, director of the Highway 61 Blues Museum, in Leland, Miss.
Now it's hard to find a hint of the once-famous blues street. Instead, warnings are issued to avoid the area: "Young guys? Don't talk to them -- period," says one man working on his car by the side of the road. There are young guys everywhere.
At one point in the Delta, it was blues that meant trouble, blues that parents didn't want to hear their kids playing, blues that was called "devil's music."
T-Model Ford is a raunchy old legend who's lived it all. He plays out his last days in this rundown, once-bustling Mississippi city that is now now half boarded up and taken over by casino boats.
"I'm a chicken-head man," he sings in one of his crowd favorites. "If you kill a chicken, save me the head."
From behind his guitar, the bluesman scans the room for women. Every time he finds one and she smiles back, his eyes sparkle. Notoriously foul-mouthed, he tells stories that "quickly become unquotable," according to local blues expert Roger Stolle, owner of the Cat Head blues and folk art store in Clarksdale, Miss.
T-Model launches into one of his explicit tales, a recent encounter with a woman he met at a gig: She expressed interest, they went home together in a cab, they went inside, he sat at the edge of the bed, she went into the bathroom, yadda yadda yadda. "I didn't know she was going to come out naked," he says.
That's not the punch line; he goes into great detail about what happened next.
"I'm an old man," he says in a faint, raspy voice to the people leaning in close to hear. "But I can still ..."
He clears his throat.
Yes, but for how long? At the annual Blues Foundation Blues Music Awards, dead artists beat out living ones.
"Everybody's afraid to get away from John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters and all of them," says Clarksdale bluesman James "Super Chikan" Johnson. "They don't think there's anything new."
"The key to it is nobody black is into that type of music," says another bluesman, Jimmy "Duck" Holmes, who owns the Blue Front Cafe juke joint, in Bentonia, Miss.
"To us, being black, blues music was like a blackberry bush or a plum tree. It was a common thing," says the 58-year-old guitarist and club owner. "So now it doesn't mean anything. The big bucks is in hip-hop and rap."
But the death of blues -- if you can even call it that -- is more than generational, more than just old people's music not being cool enough and young people's music being dismissed.
Blues came from a time of pain and shame and inequality, the kind of experiences that parents and blues elders don't necessarily want to talk about -- or might not want their kids to know about.
Delta parents are supposed to be strong. It doesn't exactly sound strong to say you were broken, downhearted, mistreated and abused. Why wallow?
"What good would it be to tell my kids that I used to pick 300 pounds of cotton a day?" says Ladell Jackson, who recently came back home to Indianola after retiring in Chicago, where he had fled from the Delta at 21 to become a bus driver.
Nobody is obligated to rehash old, bad memories. Blues music could survive quite well without lingering in the past, because everybody knows it's as timeless as it is fleeting. Sharecropping might be over, but suffering isn't.
Plenty of young people in the Delta are interested in the blues. They jam at the Delta Blues Museum Arts and Education program. They learn from relatives or seeking out living blues legends. Some of this activity gives you hope that the blues is on the cusp of a renaissance.
But there's blues education and then there's true passing down. In time, from one thing or another, the young will experience pain and sorrow the way older generations have. But for now, their lives can only begin to compare to those of the blues elders who have seen a thing or two -- or three or four or five -- and know the difference between young and old.
It's knowing in your brain versus feeling in your heart, angst versus heartbreak, beer and boobs versus whiskey and women. One means tuning your guitar to play the right notes of a blues scale. The other means playing in the right key.
The key you feel when your woman's done left you.
Part II: Blues truth and blues tourism
Part III: A proud past. But what of today?
Related Story: Did juke-joint hokum steal your mojo?
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Hillary Rhodes is an asap reporter.
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